Agenda

Note: this meeting is for interactive discussion. Feel free to ask questions!

Action Items

Friends of the Tree

Thanks to our Friend of the Tree. When adding someone to this section, please get their T-Shirt size, phone number (needed for shipping!) and send it to abourcier@mozilla.com that she can send them a shirt!

Thunderbird Development

We published first study a couple of weeks ago so we got the first batch of data back now. Unfortunately Metrics is moving their hardware so we can’t get the data right now, but we’ll get access to it soon. The data might be scewed due to ui issues we had in test pilot, so we’ll push out the first study again with those ui issues fixed.

Extension of the week

Marketing Updates

Thunderbird recruitment campaign: the goal is to organize a short and pro-active recruitment campaign during month of May. It will mainly focus on explaining what we expect from contributors accross different functions in the Thunderbird group. We think that it’s still intimidating to enroll within community.

Kilimanjaro

Product working on logging meta bugs for all top level use cases. We can then start to associate bugs to each of the use cases to create the dependency trees.

Project managers will start working with different teams to get features/bugs logged and tagged for K9O.

Many items are already in progress so we will have to do some work to tag existing stuff.

Working on post for the list about the blocking-kilimanjaro project flag and the process for keeping track of things in bugzilla.

Notices / Schedule

Mozilla-Inbound and Mozilla-Central are both Approval Required now to mitigate risk to Fennec Native 14. approval-mozilla-central should now be available for nominations. More details about the daily triage to come on dev-planning.

Major Update prompts (with security messaging) to FF11 from 3.6.13-28 will start or tomorrow

Testing of the add-on hotfix to communicate the FF13 de-support will occur no later than Thursday 4/19 with our FF12 beta audience (bug 741004)

Beta 6 will be going to build this afternoon PT (if the backout in bug 734019 is verified to fix bug 745453)

FF12 sign-offs tomorrow at 1PM PT in Warp Core

Final build of FF12 and ESR10.0.4 will happen this coming Friday (4/20)

Next merge day is 4/24

Firefox Development

bug 725408, bug 739636, bug 731541: Much of the initial work for Desktop webapps installation support has landed or is very close to landing on trunk – ongoing efforts by Myk, felipe, bsmedberg, Dan Walkowski, Tim Abraldes and others

bug 741004: Matthew Noorenberghe is working on a hotfix add-on that will notify users of Windows 2000 (and pre-SP3 XP) that we’re dropping support for their OS in Firefox 13

Engagement

PR

Events

Creative Team

Community Marketing

Support

Metrics

This move will be very disrupting, and while we are going to attempt to have everything up and running again as quickly as possible, there are a lot of configuration changes that need to happen during this move that could take time to be completed. At the end of this process however, we will have a much better environment that will allow us to rapidly improve several pieces such as building out more staging environments and enable better replication/failover in the future.

The impact for various teams is as follows:

metrics.mozilla.com website and all dashboards will be unavailable for one to two days

Nightly and weekly Metrics e-mail reports will not be delivered on Tuesday and possibly Wednesday.

Exports of ADI data to AMO & Socorro will not be delivered Tuesday and possibly Wednesday. After the move is completed, we will backfill data and export the missing data.

Log file collection / processing will be delayed during the migration. IT has worked hard to ensure we have a new collection server waiting for our arrival in the new datacenter, so we believe that we will be able to quickly get started on backprocessing. Depending on how long the migration itself takes, it could take up to four days for us to finish backprocessing (at the same time we are processing new data).

Test Pilot data submissions will not be accepted during the migration. Test Pilot has a client-side retry mechanism in it that will cause the clients to attempt to submit that data at a later time so we do not expect any data loss.

Telemetry data submissions will not be accepted during the migration. Telemetry does not have a client-side retry mechanism, so there will be an unrecoverable gap in data for the duration of the downtime. We will be making restoration of this service our top priority. We were hoping to be able to migrate this service ahead of everything else, but the hardware for the new cluster was not available in time due to missing parts. :/

Buildbot log collection will be delayed during the migration. We will work with that team to backfill any missing data after the migration is complete.

Bugzilla analysis datawarehouse will not be available during the migration. This has *no* impact on the normal operation of bugzilla.mozilla.org so unless you know specifically what this is, don’t worry about it. 🙂

If you have questions or concerns, please feel free to e-mail metrics@mozilla.com.

Evangelism

Labs

Apps

Developer Tools

Add-ons

Webdev

L10n

People Team

WebFWD

Our teams will be back in the Bay Area May 11-14 for our 2nd in-person Summit. This will include a community hack day on Saturday May 12 – details coming soon!

Schedule

Next merge is 2012-04-24

Major Topics for This Week

Release Planning

We have been keeping an eye on the blocking bug counts, stability and performance metrics. The current plan was to uplift all required code to Aurora (Fx13) and ship a Beta to the marketplace 4/16+baketime. The adjusted plan (proposed) is to wait for Fx14 to merge to Aurora and ship a Beta to the marketplace 4/24+baketime. The only date adjustment is 4/16 to 4/24. Given the longer than usual beta period, we are not expecting to adjust the final release date at this time.

Working on Soft Blockers

The release drivers may flas some blockers as “soft” meaning we’d take the fix if it makes the cut-off and is low-risk enough. Making the cut-off is an easy checkpoint, but determining low-risk is not. Even though drivers flag a bug as a soft blocker, we might still not accept the fix based on the risk level of the patch. The developer and review(s) need to chime in on the risk level.

Blocking Bug Disclaimer

Do not treat the blocking bug list as “these bugs must all be fixed before a beta candidate can be created” type of list. During blocking list cleanup, we have come across numerous bugs that would not really block if we had a beta candidate build that met our stability and performance criteria.

Stand ups

Suggested format:

What did you do last week?

What are working on this week?

Anything blocking you?

Please keep your update to under 2 minutes!

James W. (snorp)

Last week

Worked more on fullscreen support for Flash (sigh)

This week

Tabled fullscreen support, working on hack to make panning/zooming Flash better on Gingerbread/Froyo

Kats

Last week

Largely working on reducing latency to draw

bug 742019 – rewrite how touch events are handled in java

bug 740718 – null pointer dereference in the event coalescing code

bug 741288 – (partial checkin) reduce time spent in Gesture:ShowPress

bug 740883 – reduce latency between user flinging and us drawing

Also further tuning of displayport

bug 733041 – switch to velocity-bias as default to improve checkerboarding a bit

Localizers can have one-click testing of new .properties files for any installed SDK-based Add-on through the Add-on Manager

Alex is eager to improve this – so feedback is encouraged!

Identity

Apps

Firefox Desktop 14 (Nightly) – being reviewed

Native Install

Chromeless launch of apps

Firefox Mobile 15 – in progress

Was 14, shifted due to Beta work

Native install

Chromefull launch of Marketplace and apps

Proposed Android solution is to bundle the marketplace with Firefox. More coming on this.

Apps in the Cloud

Apps in the cloud server running

Apps in the cloud clients for desktop and mobile targeting Fx14 timeframe

Feedback Summary

Desktop

Firefox 11:

Major increase in the number of people with babylon toolbar and “text enhance”. We’ve seen it for months now but it’s a lot higher recently. (It’s hard to get actual stats because it’s just people jumping on older threads).

Still lots of redirecting to malicious search engines (a majority of our top threads)

Also increase in Flash issues (including difficulty getting it updated and/or Facebook flash games not working)

Market Insights

Desktop / Platform

Adobe

Amazon

Amazon released the In-App Purchasing API for applications sold in their Android appstore. This API allows application developers to monetize not only only on the initial sale of applications but by selling upgrades, features, and other content directly in their applications. Consumers can make purchases using their existing Amazon IDs. Both Google and Apple’s stores have similar functionality.

Apple

Apple released a critical update for Java to address, in part, a vulnerability that had allowed the Flashback Trojan to infect more than half a million Mac OS X systems worldwide.

Google

The Android team released an updated emulator for the platform, adding GPU support, more hardware feature emulation and improved CPU performance.

Google Chrome’s WebRTC team also published a roadmap of upcoming work to fine-tune their WebRTC implementation that is arriving in Chrome. Upcoming work includes screen sharing, a data API, and recording.

Chrome’s stable and beta channels were updated. Fixes included 12 security issues, including a number of use-after-free issues.

The Dev version of ChromeOS now has the Aura window manager, changing the interface to be much more like that of a standard operating system like Windows.

Microsoft

Microsoft, in partnership with Bocoup, a HTML5 training provider, annnounced BuildNewGames.com, a website that aims to introduce and promote the use of open web technologies to build great gaming experiences “without plugins”. The section on mobile browsers is interesting, as it includes some frames-per-second benchmarks of performance on the iPhone, iPad, and Galaxy Nexus.

Microsoft also released eleven patches for Windows and Internet Explorer, seven of which were listed as “critical”

Tizen

The Tizen group published the presentations made at the Linux Foundation Summit. These include an architecture overview, a summaries of the greater Tizen community and the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries, and descriptions of planned use of the Wayland display server and the oFono telephony stack

Webkit

Webkit announced availability of version 1.0 of the Webkit remote debugger. This JSON-based tool is now supported in the Blackberry Playbook and Chrome for Android.

Webkit also now supports Battery Status and Vibration APIs on the Blackberry, arguably the first WebKit port to do so.

The author of the open source color picker used in WebKit’s Web Inspector posted a good overview of its design and features

Other

The HTML5rocks.com team posted a good list of summaries and documentation for the internals of a number of different web browsers.

Agenda

Note: this meeting is for interactive discussion. Feel free to ask questions!

Action Items

Friends of the Tree

Thanks to our Friend of the Tree. When adding someone to this section, please get their T-Shirt size, phone number (needed for shipping!) and send it to abourcier@mozilla.com that she can send them a shirt!

GFX

Continue to be focused on mobile Firefox.

We fixed most of Firefox on Android’s extreme crashiness, with the notable exception of on David Baron’s phone, who alone accounts for 13% of our crashes (221 unique crash IDs) in the past week, the #1 topcrasher by a large margin.

We’re focused on performance and checkerboardiness now, with our major work being tracked as Fennec beta blockers.

JS

Layout

Focused on mobile Firefox.

Readability.

Scrolling/Zoom bugs.

Video

MediaStreams near landing on m-c

Initial WebRTC landings being planned (preffed off).

DOM

No updates today.

WebAPI

Network

Identity

Plugins

Mobile

Accessibility

Tree Management

hg.m.o downtime Thursday April 12 6-9am PDT for migration to new datacentre

Stability Report

Socorro

Due to a file name pattern change by Adobe, the version of current Flash releases isn’t detected by Socorro (bug 742735). This also makes KaiRo’s Flash crash/hang reports not list those 11.2.* versions – a fix is ready for landing and should be deployed in tomorrow’s Socorro release.

All-hands Status Meeting Agenda

Items in this section will be shared during the live all-hand status meeting.

Friends of the Tree

Les Orchard

Thanks for graciously sharing your work (on Badger) with the Open Badges team. Your efforts with DjangoBadger are deeply appreciated as well. Your contributions to open source help us all. You rock.

Upcoming Events

This Week

Monday, 09 April

Tuesday, 10 April

Wednesday, 11 April

Thursday, 12 April

Topic of Brownbag

Presenter

Time

Description

The Pyschology Behind Pair Designing

Karl Dotter from Dopamine

12:00PM

Karl will be speaking about pair designing and introduce us to some case studies where this technique has worked for his design firm.

Friday, 13 April

Topic of Brownbag

Presenter

Time

Description

MozCamp LatAm

Kate Naszradi and Mary Colvig

10:00AM

This will be a brief overview, training, and Q&A for staff who will be attending MozCamp Latin America.

Brown Bag w/ Board Member Reid Hoffman

Reid Hoffman

12:00PM

Reid will be giving out his new book.

Next Week

Product Status Updates (voice updates)

Firefox Future (9, 10, 11)

Speaker Location:

Firefox Current (3.6, 8)

Speaker Location:

Mobile Firefox

Speaker Location:

Thunderbird

Speaker Location:

Older Branch Work

Speaker Location:

Drumbeat / Foundation

Speaker Location: Erin Knight, phone

Open Badges Public Beta launch

What: Public beta version of the Open Badge Infrastructure, the underlying badge specification and set of repositories (‘Backpacks’) to support a badge-as-alternative-credential ecosystem

Pretty big deal: lots of badges are getting a lot of attention and lots of people are working on badges toward a common goal of supporting all types of learning, especially informal, interest-driven and on-the-job learning. The OBI is a key part of success since it allows learners to earn badges across learning experiences, collect them into a single collection they manage and share them out with potential employers, etc.

Roundtable

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Notes and non-voice status updates that aren’t part of the live meeting go here.

Status Updates By Team (*non-voice* updates)

Firefox

Platform

Services

Messaging

Mobile

IT

Data Centers

SCL3/SJC1:

We are in the middle of a massive data center move from one of our original data centers, SJC1 to our other data centers. We are on track to move roughly 1300 servers and virtual machines by the middle of the quarter.

While migration work has been going on for a year now to get websites and services out of there in advance of this move, some services are hanging on to the end and may require downtime to get them physically moved (or virtually migrated) to their new home. Please be patient with us as this move takes our resources away from other projects, and as some of these services incur downtime for their move.

Continued migration of community infrastructure form sjc1 to scl3.

PEK2: Data center migration in China for Mozilla Online continued this week, with fox2mike on site finishing the load balancer and vm hosting, and working on moving key sites.

Websites

Firefox 3.6 Start Page. This week we stood up a cluster (admin, dev, stage, and prod) along with global caching for the Mozilla-hosted Firefox 3.6 start page.

www.mozilla.org multi-datacenter. Last week we spun up www.mozilla.org in Santa Clara. It is now hosted in two data centers and cached out of Amsterdam. We will be making more use of CDNs in the next step.

Infrastructure

Completed Zimbra migration to HCI. All @mozilla.com & @mozillafoundation.org email accounts are on a new Zimbra infrastructure (and the migration happened with no impact to you!). See blog posts by justdave & mrz.

Turned up hundreds of new systems (more than I can collectively count amongst all teams in IT). For example, 128 nodes with new Sandy Bridge Xeon procs have been deployed to the SCL3 data center, and 64 to the PHX1 data center.

Zeus NIC cards (PHX1). We replaced the NIC cards in our PHX1 load balancers this week with new vendor-recommended cards to overcome problems that have plagued us for months. So far, we have not had any lb-related problems in PHX1. However, part of this success is due to moving the load of Addons version checking and about:home snippets to a new set of Netscaler load balancers which handle the heavy-loaded sites better but don’t provide some of the features we enjoy out of our Stingray load balancers.

Developer Services

hg.mozilla.org

A lot of work was wrapped up in prepping a new environment for hg.mozilla.org in our new data center.

We should be announcing downtime soon to make the switch this week.

Please do not abort a push to try (with ctrl-c) once it has begun. Due to the added pushlog in commit hooks, it causes hg to break and requires manual intervention to fix.

mbrandt: struggling with mozillians, not asking for team coverage, but the team is struggling with quality and it’s taking a lot of my focus. Really trying to help them out- but it’s taking away from pull requests and other duties. Am sure that there’s nothing others can do to help with this.

Schedule

Next merge is 2012-04-24

Major Topics for This Week

Release Planning

We have been keeping an eye on the blocking bug counts, stability and performance metrics. The current plan was to uplift all required code to Aurora (Fx13) and ship a Beta to the marketplace 4/16+baketime. The adjusted plan (proposed) is to wait for Fx14 to merge to Aurora and ship a Beta to the marketplace 4/24+baketime. The only date adjustment is 4/16 to 4/24. Given the longer than usual beta period, we are not expecting to adjust the final release date at this time.

Aurora Uplift

Pushed a non-graphics uplift to Aurora so we can get more testing on changes to the Java UI and Sync.

Backporting to XUL Fennec ESR10: bug 701002 – Put Java stacks into a separate field (not AppNotes) (and maybe bug 739418 – If a rethrown exception is uncaught, report the stack trace of the original exception, not the rethrowing exception)

There was a change to nsSVGForeignObject reflow by jwatt, bug 734079, that is blocking the backport of bug 708187 to aurora. Something in the bug is needed to avoid assertions in debug mode for bug 708187. Trying to figure out what to do here.

Aurora (13)

We’ll be addressing the support changes in FF13 during the FF12 cycle with bug 741004 – Create a hotfix add-on to communicate the FF13 de-support

Nightly (14)

Do you use or want to use data collected by Telemetry? We’re starting to work on the Telemetry dashboard UX. Please provide your thoughts on the Telemetry dashboard, what works, what doesn’t, what you’ve find useful in bug 736484 or contact Lawrence Mandel.

The flash update caused “your browser is blocking flash” errors on Yahoo/AT&T mail. This has since been resolved (thanks kev!)

Mobile

UX & User Research

User Research
The UR team will be conducting a longitudinal study to understand how people use our new Search Tabs feature. Search tabs allows you to search for something, and see results from various sources. For example, if you search for “harry potter,” you will see the Google results for “harry potter” with icons down the left hand side of your page. Currently, the icons are for Yahoo, Bing, Amazon, Ebay, Twitter, and Wikipedia. If you click on the Yahoo icon, the main screen will change from Google to Yahoo, and you can see the results there. The idea is that the search tabs provide more data to the user, and users will see that some searches are better on some search engines than on others. It’s a way to help open the web back up during the search process.

Overall Study Objectives

Understand the situations when people use tabbed search, their reactions to using tabbed search, and what they do with the information after searching

Market Insights

Desktop / Platform

Amazon

Amazon released an update for the Silk Browser included with the Kindle Fire. It includes a “Reading View” feature: “When invoked by the customer, Silk will load the body of the page in a reading-optimized, single screen view (even for multi-page articles). The full page is still available in the background, allowing the reader to easily toggle back to a traditional view to see other interesting features on the page.” Some early reviews have been mixed, noting that it sometimes renders multi-page articles in the wrong order.

Facebook

Microsoft

Another post describes how pinned sites will work with the Windows 8 start screen

Adobe

Adobe released an updated version of Flash, the last standalone version for the Linux platform, that requires that developers pay a 9% royalty on revenues over $50,000 for applications that make use of two new performance APIs. Gamasutra published a good summary of how Flash developers feel about it.

Apple

Opera

WebM

The WebM project announced that more chip vendors have introduced hardware support for the video protocol, including Rockchip and ST-Ericsson. Smart TVs with full HD WebM support are coming to the market from LG Electronics this spring, with other OEMs following soon after.